We humans are strange, mixed-up things. We are God’s creations, carrying God’s likeness and love—yet we are fallen creatures, torn by sin and selfishness and decay. We seem both animal and angel, and often we’re unable to truly grasp the division within ourselves.
I thought of this paradox when reading a story from Time about The Game of Death, a new and shocking documentary by French filmmaker Chistophe Nick.
The premise of the film is this: Nick sets up a fake reality show, complete with a studio audience and a well-known host, in which “contestants” are asked to answer a series of questions while hooked up to an electrical device. If a contestant fails to answer a question correctly, another contestant pushes a button and administers a shock.
Now, the person supposedly getting shocked is actually just fine: He’s in on the experiment. Everyone involved is, in fact—except for the person pushing the button. The subject is told that, with each missing question, the voltage gets higher. He’s encouraged by the host and goaded by the audience to keep pushing—even as the person answering the questions is screaming in pain and pleading to stop the game.
Of the 80 unknowing participants, 64 of them—81%—eventually pushed the button 20 times, “killing” the contestant. Only 16 walked away.
Similar experiments have been conducted for 40 years, and most have unearthed similarly disheartening, conclusions. If an authority tells us to do something, we’re prone to do it—even if we hurt or kill another living being.
In his documentary, Nick intended to illustrate the power of television. “For the past 10 years, most commercial channels have used humiliation, violence and cruelty to create increasingly extreme programs,” he says in a voice-over during the documentary. ” … Television can—without possible opposition—organize the death of a person as entertainment, and 8 out of 10 people will submit to that.”
Nick made his point, of course. Television is indeed a powerful force, as we at Plugged In are always reminding you.
But television is powerful only because we allow it to be so, and the story made me think a bit deeper … about how I would react if I was pushing the button.
I tell myself that I would not hurt another human being—certainly never to the point of death. But then, I think, that’s what we would all say, isn’t it? None of us, sitting here reading, could conceive ourselves participating in such a ghoulish game show. And perhaps we’d be right.
But according to Nick, some of us—perhaps 4 out of 5 of us—would be wrong. The animal in us would best the angel and we’d push that button. And that’s a sobering thought indeed.
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